Homeless for the Holidays
At Civic Center after dark, Friday is dope night in San Francisco.
The Friday before Thanksgiving, as I threaded my way with my press pass through the crowd under the dome at City Hall, past the cascading marble staircase, everyone was in outer space. Like they do at the many City Hall Friday night events, bow-tied, inebriated Men in Black, and fantastically gowned chattering women tippled champagne at a crystal, silver, and golden gala.
At what appeared to be an Asian celebration, a frilly red, pink, and white silk dragon undulated by. But the only beings considered strange alien beasts were the homeless folks hunched in the dark across the square at United Nations Plaza.
After the brilliant harvest days of fall, the holidays approach. Days shorten, the sun disappears, and black cold descends. At brightly lit parties, we lean together and huddle for warmth against an ebony abyss of stars until Spring and light appear again.
The whole idea of getting blasted, toasted, altered, or “on one” is to feel no pain. The housed anesthetize themselves with holiday joy juice against fear of Winter dark and cosmic aloneness.
Out in the harsher reality of actual cold—holiday or everyday—the unhoused numb themselves as well. As the self-appointed Mayor of Turk Street once told me, “The worst pain of homeless people is the loneliness of alienation.”
This is why that night I faced a preposterously impossible reporting assignment: I was supposed to ask homeless people what they were thankful for and how it felt to be left ass-out on the streets at the holidays.
I plunged down the back steps toward the Library, a pit forming in my stomach as I acknowledged the cruelty of the question.
“Oh, sure!” said an imaginary homeless guy in my head, “Despite my leg sores and insect-infested clothes, I am thankful for the turkey bones I found in the trash. I’m grateful for the fix that kills the pain.”
Suspecting I might meet a few drug-dulled eyes, but on a deadline, I set off across the green expanse of Civic Center Plaza.
A blanket mound heaped on the library wall emerged through the mist surrounded by black plastic bags. A woman’s dazed face swathed in wool scarves smiled sleepily out. A thicker fog-fragrance of marijuana coalesced around her head.
“May I interview you for a news story?”
“Probably not,” she said.
Around the corner, when I asked a friendly elderly gentleman to answer a few questions, he declined and pointed to a girl slumped in a stupor beside him. An unlikely candidate.
Across Grove from the Salvation Army, mummy shapes slept on a heated grate. No bothering them.
On Larkin, a musician at a bus stop with his guitar said he “won the lottery” and got a “great place” near the Hall of Justice. He almost had his instrument case snatched. “Watch your tape recorder,” he warned as I headed into UN Plaza.
Near Market, a gap-toothed blonde woman shouted, “I’ll tell you something!”
Next to her, a dark bundled dragon shape clung to a low cement wall out of which growled communal mumblings and dark laughter.
One of this clump of fifty-ish men whose faces emerged serially from the mist was a brush-cut man sheltered three months at 150 Otis.
“You’ll really interview me while I’m high on crack?” he inquired judgmentally. His scornful gaze pivoted away tracking the approaching Unabomber hoodie of a drug dealer.
“I only help people who help me out,” the dealer announced.
“See you on the other side,” I replied.
He laughed. I left.
At the UN Building, a blonde woman screamed, “I saw you at the drop-in center. You can interview me when my meth freak-out is over.” She rattled on until I escaped earshot.
I headed West on Turk toward the mental health center at Gough across from Jefferson Square Park, where a train of carts is often parked.
A small-boned black man with finely chiseled cheeks chatted with the security guard. Identifying himself as Tyrone, he generously consented to be interviewed about being homeless for the holidays.
“I can talk until I have to leave for work.”
“What work do you do?”
“I make good money recycling cans and bottles—$ 50 to $75 a night.”
He remembered happy Thanksgivings in East Texas with his grandparents, simple, poor Southern farmers who raised him. “I look like my mother. She had a brain aneurysm and died right before my eyes when I was nine.
“My grandparents took us in—me and my brothers and sisters.”
“Do you have good memories of the holidays?”
“Damn good memories, yeah!
“Down in Texas, Christmas was a big deal. You got so much activity going on. All the family was there.”
His grandmother, up all night cooking, prepared turkey or chicken with dumplings, home made potato pie, peach pie, banana pudding. “My grandma, she could cook. She was my best friend.”
His grandfather, “a good man, old-fashioned, country-raised,” sat in his chair smiling quietly. “He didn’t have to say it, but you knew he loved you.”
“I got married and had two boys. They’re grown. They have their own lives. I lost them because of mistakes I made.”
“Drugs?” I asked.
“Something like that,” he smiled. “I did some time.” He had been clean for years.
“Do you live outside?”
“Yes. Who wants to live in a shelter with druggedout people? Or on Sixth Street in a run-down SRO?”
“How do you spend Thanksgiving?”
“I work. I recycle. It’s like any workday.
“For a while a lot of years, I did not like the holiday season. It brought back memories. You miss family. For a while [the memories] were painful, but now they really make it easy. Even on the loneliest day, I can think about those times.
“I’ve been through a lot,” he confided. He traveled the world six years in the Navy, two in the Army. After living in Amsterdam, he came here. “I love San Francisco’s diversity. I don’t want to live anywhere else.
“I read a book that said everything you go through is for a reason. I have a destiny.”
“Has it been revealed to you?” I asked.
“Not yet.” A confident smile lit his face.
This unhoused man seemed at home in himself. The next night when I walked by, he and a lovely, slim girl were packing his cart, sharing the recycling. Is his destiny tied up with her? Is she his home?
Perhaps this dim Thanksgiving memory—the grandmother who fed him, the grandfather who loved him—protects him in the present from the dark.
“My grandmother and my mother, they’re always going to be with me everywhere I go.”
Perhaps such holiday memories made him strong, and self-reliant, instilling in his child’s heart a sense of his own human goodness and meaning, established firmly in love.
Carol